I have a backlog of books to read. This is not a negative thing, I embrace it as a positive. When finished a book I can look at my Tsundoku and pick my next read immediately. I did not expect another Pynchon book to be published in my lifetime, he’s getting up in years, he’s 88. When I finished Ubik in the last week of September I didn’t start a new book immediately, in anticipation of the October 7th release of Shadow Ticket. I wanted to start it on release date and did, so read Italian FolkTales while I waited for the release.
I was excited to chew on this novel, but what I realized halfway through was that I enjoy the novels from an earlier period in his career more. Everything from Against the Day and earlier. Vice, Edge and now Ticket are all variants of a gumshoe genre which is not my favourite. With respect to those other two more recent novels, I enjoyed this more than Bleeding Edge but not as much as Inherent Vice.